The Poet's Poet Part 4

The poet's vilified contemporaries employ various means of retaliating.

They may invite him to dinner, then point out that His Omniscience does not know how to manage a fork, or they may investigate his family tree, and then cut his acquaintance, or, most often, they may listen to his fanciful accounts of reality, then brand him as a liar. So the vicious circle is completed, for the poet is hara.s.sed by this treatment into the belief that he is the target for organized persecution, and as a result his egotism grows more and more morbid, and his contempt for the public more deliberately expressed.

At the beginning of the period under discussion the social snubs seem to have rankled most in the poet's nature. This was doubtless a survival from the times of patronage. James Thomson [Footnote: See the _Castle of Indolence,_ Canto II, stanzas XXI-III. See also _To Mr. Thomson, Doubtful to What Patron to Address the Poem,_ by H. Hill.] and Thomas Hood [Footnote: See _To the Late Lord Mayor._] both concerned themselves with the problem. Kirke White appears to have felt that patronage of poets was still a live issue. [Footnote: See the _Ode Addressed to the Earle of Carlisle._] Crabbe, in a narrative poem, offered a pathetic picture of a young poet dying of heartbreak because of the malicious cruelty of the aristocracy toward him, a farmer's son.

[Footnote: _The Patron._] Later on Mrs. Browning took up the cudgels for the poet, in _Lady Geraldine's Courts.h.i.+p,_ and upheld the n.o.bility of the unt.i.tled poet almost too strenuously, for his morbid pride makes him appear by all odds the worst sn.o.b in the poem. The less dignified contingent of the public annoys the poet by burlesquing the grandiose manners and poses to which his large nature easily lends itself. People are likely to question the poet's powers of soul because he forgets to cut his hair, or to fasten his blouse at the throat. And of course there have been rhymsters who have gone over to the side of the enemy, and who have made profit from exhibiting their freakishness, after the manner of circus monstrosities. Thomas Moore sometimes takes malicious pleasure in thus showing up the oddities of his race. [See _Common Sense and Genius,_ and _Rhymes by the Road._] Later libelers have been, usually, writers of no reputation. The literary squib that made most stir in the course of the century was not a poem, but the novel, _The Green Carnation,_ which poked fun at the mannerisms of the 1890 poets.

[Footnote: Gilbert and Sullivan's _Patience_ made an even greater sensation.] Oddly, American poets betray more indignation than English ones over such lampoons. Longfellow makes Michael Angelo exclaim,

I say an artist Who does not wholly give himself to art, Who has about him nothing marked or strange, But tries to suit himself to all the world Will ne'er attain to greatness.

[Footnote: _Michael Angelo._]

Sometimes an American poet takes the opposite tack, and denies that his conduct differs from that of other men. Thus Richard Watson Gilder insists that the poet has "manners like other men" and that on thisaccount the world that is eagerly awaiting the future poet will miss him. He repeats the world's query:

How shall we know him?

Ye shall know him not, Till, ended hate and scorn, To the grave he's borne.

[Footnote: _When the True Poet Comes._]

Whitman, in his defense, goes farther than this, and takes an original att.i.tude toward his failure to keep step with other men, declaring

Of these states the poet is the equable man, Not in him but off him things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their full returns.

[Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Sh.o.r.e._]

As for the third method employed by the public in its attacks upon the poet,--that of making charges against his truthfulness,--the poet resents this most bitterly of all. Gray, in _The Bard,_ lays the wholesale slaughter of Scotch poets by Edward I, to their fearless truth telling. A number of later poets have written pathetic tales showing the tragic results of the unimaginative public's denial of the poet's delicate perceptions of truth. [Footnote: See Jean Ingelow, _Gladys and her Island;_ Helen Hunt Jackson, _The Singer's Hills;_ J. G.

Holland, _Jacob Hurd's Child._]

To the poet's excited imagination, it seems as if all the world regarded his race as a constantly increasing swarm of flies, and had started in on a systematic course of extirpation. [Footnote: See G. K. Chesterton, _More Poets Yet._] As for the professional critic, he becomes an ogre, conceived of as eating a poet for breakfast every morning. The new singer is invariably warned by his brothers that he must struggle for his honor and his very life against his malicious audience. It is doubtful if we could find a poet of consequence in the whole period who does not somewhere characterize men of his profession as the martyrs of beauty. [Footnote: Examples of abstract discussions of this sort are: Burns, _The Poet's Progress;_ Keats, _Epistle to George Felton Matthew;_ Tennyson, _To ---- After Reading a Life and Letters;_ Longfellow, _The Poets;_ Thomas Buchanan Read, _The Master Poets;_ Paul Hamilton Hayne, _Though Dowered with Instincts;_ Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy;_ George Meredith, _Bellerophon;_ S. L. Fairfield, _The Last Song_ (1832); S. J. Ca.s.sells, _A Poet's Reflections_ (1851); Richard Gilder, _The New Poet;_ Richard Realf, _Advice Gratis_ (1898); James Whitcomb Riley, _An Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton, _The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming Poet._] Sh.e.l.ley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous designs of the public.

A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are described:

Where the heart of each should beat, There seemed a wound instead of it, From whence the blood dropped to their feet.

The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter waters,

And toads seen crawling on his hand, And clinging bats, but dimly scanned, Full in his face their wings expand.

A paleness took the poet's cheek; "Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek The lady's will with utterance meek: "Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"

(And this time she spoke cheerfully) Behooves thee know world's cruelty.

The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society.

From cla.s.sic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides.

[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved."

[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging, imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy, aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante [Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna_.] and Ta.s.so [Footnote: Byron, _The Lament of Ta.s.so_; Sh.e.l.ley, _Song for Ta.s.so_; James Thomson, B. V., _Ta.s.so to Leonora_.] have received most attention on account of their wrongs. [Footnote: The sufferings of several French poets are commented upon in English verse. Swinburne's poetry on Victor Hugo, Bulwer Lytton's _Andre Chenier_, and Alfred Lang's _Gerard de Nerval_ come to mind.]

Naturally the adversities which touch our writers most nearly are those of the modern English poets. It is the poets of the romantic movement who are thought of as suffering greatest injustice. Chatterton's extreme youth probably has helped to incense many against the cruelty that caused his death. [Footnote: See Sh.e.l.ley, _Adonais_; Coleridge, _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_; Keats, _Sonnet on Chatterton_; James Montgomery, _Stanzas on Chatterton_; Rossetti, _Sonnet to Chatterton_; Edward Dowden, _Prologue to Maurice Gerothwohl's Version of Vigny's Chatterton_; W. A. Percy, _To Chatterton_.] Southey is singled out by Landor for especial commiseration; _Who Smites the Wounded_ is an indignant uncovering of the world's cruelty in exaggerating Southey's faults. Landor insinuates that this persecution is extended to all geniuses:

Alas! what snows are shed Upon thy laurelled head, Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!

Malignity lets none Approach the Delphic throne; A hundred lane-fed curs bark down Fame's hundred tongues.

[Footnote: _To Southey_, _1833_.]

The ill-treatment of Burns has had its measure of denunciation. The centenary of his birth brought forth a good deal of such verse.

Of course Byron's sufferings have had their share of attention, though, remembering his enormous popularity, the better poets have left to the more gullible rhymsters the echo of his tirades against persecution, [Footnote: See T. H. Chivers, _Lord Byron's Dying Words to Ada_, and _Byron_ (1853); Charles Soran, _Byron_ (1842); E. F. Hoffman, _Byron_ (1849).] and have conceived of the public as beaten at its own game by him. Thus Sh.e.l.ley exults in the thought,

The Pythian of the age one arrow drew And smiled. The spoilers tempt no second blow, They fawn on the proud feet that laid them low.

[Footnote: _Adonais._]

The wrongs of Keats, also, are not so much stressed in genuine poetry as formerly, and the fiction that his death was due to the hostility of his critics is dying out, though Sh.e.l.ley's _Adonais_ will go far toward giving it immortality. Oscar Wilde's characterization of Keats as "the youngest of the martyrs" [Footnote: _At the Grave of Keats._]

brings the tradition down almost to the present in British verse, but for the most part its popularity is now limited to American rhymes. One is rather indignant, after reading Keats' own manly words about hostile criticism, to find a nondescript verse-writer putting the puerile self-characterization into his mouth:

I, the Boy-poet, whom with curse They hounded on to death's untimely doom.

[Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_ (1856).]

In even less significant verse the most maudlin sympathy with Keats is expressed. One is tempted to feel that Keats suffered less from his enemies than from his admirers, of the type which Browning characterized as "the foolish crowd of rushers-in upon genius ... never content till they cut their initials on the cheek of the Medicean Venus to prove they wors.h.i.+p her." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, November 17, 1845.]

With the possible exception of Chatterton, the poet whose wrongs have raised the most indignant storm of protest is Sh.e.l.ley. Several poets, as the young Browning, Francis Thompson, James Thomson, B. V., and Mr.

Woodberry, have made a chivalrous championing of Sh.e.l.ley almost part of their poetical platform. No doubt the facts of Sh.e.l.ley's life warrant such sympathy. Then too, Sh.e.l.ley's sense of injustice, unlike Byron's, is not such as to seem weak to us, though it is so freely expressed in his verse. In addition one is likely to feel particular sympathy for Sh.e.l.ley because the recoil of the public from him cannot be laid to his scorn. His enthusiasms were always for the happiness of the entire human race, as well as for himself. Everything in his unfortunate life vouches for the sincerity of his statement, in the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_:

Never joy illumed my brow Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free This world from its dark slavery.

Accordingly Sh.e.l.ley's injuries seem to have affected him as a sudden hurt does a child, with a sense of incomprehensibility, and later poets have rallied to his defense as if he were actually a child.[Footnote: See E. C. Stedman, _Ariel_; James Thomson, B. V., _Sh.e.l.ley_; Alfred Austin, _Sh.e.l.ley's Death_; Stephen Vincent Benet, _The General Public_.]

The vicariousness of the nineteenth century poet in bewailing the hurts of his brethren is likely to have provoked a smile in us, as in the mourners of Adonais, at recognizing one

Who in another's fate now wept his own.

Of course a suppressed personal grudge may not always have been a factor in lending warmth to these defenses. Mrs. Browning is an ardent advocate of the misunderstood poet, though she herself enjoyed a full measure of popularity. But when Landor so warmly champions Southey, and Swinburne springs to the defense of Victor Hugo, one cannot help remembering that the public did not show itself wildly appreciative of either of these defenders. So, too, when Oscar Wilde works himself up over the persecutions of Dante, Keats and Byron, we are minded of the irreverent crowds that followed Wilde and his lily down the street. When the poet is too proud to complain of his own wrongs at the hands of the public, it is easy for him to strike in defense of another. As the last century wore on, this vicarious indignation more and more took the place of a personal outcry. Comparatively little has been said by poets since the romantic period about their own persecutions.[Footnote: See, however, Joaquin Miller, _I Shall Remember_, and _Vale_; Francis Ledwidge, _The Visitation of Peace_.]

Occasionally a poet endeavors to placate the public by a.s.suming a pose of equality. The tradition of Chaucer, fostered by the _Canterbury Tales_, is that by carefully hiding his genius, he succeeded in keeping on excellent terms with his contemporaries. Percy Mackaye, in the _Canterbury Pilgrims_, shows him obeying St. Paul's injunction so literally that the parson takes him for a brother of the cloth, the plowman is surprised that he can read, and so on, through the whole social gamut of the Pilgrims. But in the nineteenth century this friendly att.i.tude seldom works out so well. Walt Whitman flaunts his ability to fraternize with the man of the street. But the American public has failed "to absorb him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." [Footnote: _By Blue Ontario's Sh.o.r.e._] Emerson tries to get on common ground with his audience by a.s.serting that every man is a poet to some extent,[Footnote: See _The Enchanter_.] and it is consistent with the poetic theory of Yeats that he makes the same a.s.sertion as Emerson:

There cannot be confusion of sound forgot, A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.

[Footnote: _Pandeen._]

But when the mob jeers at a poet, it does not take kindly to his retort, "Poet yourself." Longfellow, J. G. Holland and James Whitcombe Riley have been warmly commended by some of their brothers [Footnote: See O.

W. Holmes, _To Longfellow_; P. H. Hayne, _To Henry W. Longfellow_; T. B.

Read, _A Leaf from the Past_; E. C. Stedman, _J. G. H._; P. L. Dunbar, _James Whitcombe Riley_; J. W. Riley, _Rhymes of Ironquill_.] for their promiscuous friendliness, but on the whole there is a tendency on the part of the public to sniff at these poets, as well as at those who commend them, because they make themselves so common. One may deride the public's inconsistency, yet, after all, we have not to read many pages of the "homely" poets before their professed ability to get down to the level of the "common man" begins to remind one of pre-campaign speeches.

There seems to be nothing for the poet to do, then, but to accept the hostility of the world philosophically. There are a few notable examples of the poet even welcoming the solitude that society forces upon him, because it affords additional opportunity for self-communion. Everyone is familiar with Wordsworth's insistence that uncompanionableness is essential to the poet. In the _Prelude_ he relates how, from early childhood,

I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, The self-sufficing power of solitude.

Elsewhere he disposes of the forms of social intercourse:

These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast night.

[Footnote: _Personal Talk_.]

So he describes the poet's character:

He is retired as noontide dew Or fountain in a noonday grove.

[Footnote: _The Poet's Epitaph_.]

In American verse Wordsworth's mood is, of course, reflected in Bryant, and it appears in the poetry of most of Bryant's contemporaries.